James L. Brooks Quotes

When you're working on a film, it's almost like photographing paintings at a museum. You're photographing somebody else's world. I just try and interpret it and make it real, and make it what the actors are about, what the director is about, and what the film is about.

The challenge with 'Watchmen' is making sure that the ideas that were in the book got into the movie. That was my biggest stretch. I wanted people to watch the movie and get it. It's one of those things where, over time, it has happened more.

Film is a window to the real world but a lie that makes you believe the unbelievable.

My wish is to bring my heroes to the big screen, and many of them have already appeared in my films.

There's something very dreamlike about film, and I will always be very fascinated by that, and I'm always tempted to go in that direction.

When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to remember the book. It's important to see the film as a film.

Listen, there are some movies that are set in stone and the writer or the director does not want to change, but I've never worked on a movie, including my own, that didn't take advantage of a rehearsal process.

As a filmmaker, you have to understand the essence of the book and tell the story you want to see on the screen, and hopefully please yourself - because you can't possibly please everyone.

I've just had the opportunity to see the finished film of 'The Hunger Games.' I'm really happy with how it turned out. I feel like the book and the film are individual yet complementary pieces that enhance one another.

It's not that there aren't people who care creatively in the world of television, but there's always a bit more time in making a movie. I always feel films are more of a creative journey.

It doesn't matter who's directing, or who's doing the movie; there are a ton of things that can go wrong, and they do all the time. So you just have to figure out how to get through it, and then how the director finally puts it together, and then see what the audience takes from it. That's the most important thing to me.

As an actor, you can go in, and you give your best performance, but if you hand that performance to ten different directors and ten different editors, you get ten different movies.

Having done both commercial and hard-hitting cinema, I can say none of them are easy.

On the sets of the movie 'Manto,' I found that one of the challenges of embodying real-life stories is the mixed medium of facts and imagination, and how one's collage of experiences colour ones representation on celluloid.

We always said that directors work their whole lives to get final cut on a movie. We have that. So why would you want to run away from what every other director is sprinting toward their entire careers?

It would have been tough for anyone to adapt 'Push' - an amazing but wrenching novel by Sapphire - for the screen, and I think director Lee Daniels made interesting choices, particularly with Precious' fantasies. In my view, some of them work and some do not, but they are definitely provocative directorial choices.

Every film is a challenge. I always say that making a movie is like film school - you're always learning. But unlike most schools, you never get done with it. You never learn everything.

Just movies in general. It's such a wonderful business as much as you feel, you are fine tuning your craft, every movie is a completely different challenge. Every fight sequence is different. Every action set piece. I enjoy that.

Great stories don't often make great movies. Its' a crafted art form.

Making the films is never easy, but actually that aspect of trying to make a better film or to keep the standard high is something that comes organically.

I've always seen it to be a privilege to make movies. It's a really expensive, creative medium.

Most times you do a movie every place except for what the camera sees is just a mess with the lights, people, and cameras so you get used to it. There is no way to shut that out, there is always a constant reminder of how many people it takes, what is going on and how many elements that goes into making this scene look right.

The Coen brothers said something that helped me, "When you put the book down, you have a certain feeling, a certain understanding. That's what they need to feel when they walk out of the theater. That's your job, to literally put this book on film, you won't make a good movie, you'll do no service to anyone.

I make movies. I'm not in politics.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.